Ewen McNeill wrote:

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Now that makes sense! How often to councils have elections?

Every three years; the next set is next year (2004) IIRC.

And for those that think Simon is joking, he's not. Even if you can't get any budget set aside for installing fibre, just ensuring that council ducts are put in each time the road is opened up for some other reason (eg, Wellington has some large holes in the CBD at present for upgrading the storm water system -- it'd be a shame if they were closed up again without ducts having been put in alongside), and some sensible approach for operators to gain access to those council ducts would make a huge difference.

For that matter coordinating the installation of wiring/ducts/etc into the roads, so that the costs of digging is shared, would help -- especially if it were made a condition of any road works permits. And you could probably sell it to the public on reduced inconvenience (eg, road only dug up once in 6 months, rather than three times) alone.

Some councils (eg, Wellington) have special coordination teams to help movies be made around the town; it seems to me that a similar amount of money spent on a few clueful people to coordinate shared ducts, shared digging, etc, would achieve similarly large rewards for relatively little money.

I'll be making submissions to the 4 Wairarapa District Council's Annual Plans next year, seeking to make it compulsory for anyone who is digging up roads, making trenches etc, to put in a bit of ducting and mark it on a plan. Further, that people who wish to use the duct for fibre, ethernet or whatever must be not for profit organisations, who are building infrastructure for public good. Perhaps this could be done everywhere in NZ? Someone commented earlier in the thread that having neighbourhood networks is not overly appealing. The first level of appeal is that once you have a group of people playing together, then you can have an amalgamated link to the Internet - more bandwidth for less cost per each. Remember the telco model is to give you the skinniest, most restrictive possible pipe for the most expensive price. So amalgamation / consolidation makes sense, even if its only small pockets of people. The next stage is just how important the network becomes - for instead of worrying about per MB traffic charges, people can actually use a big pipe to throw masses of data for sensible and useful purposes. Then look to join each little network to the next little network, until we have just one NZ wide totally alternate network... I find it impossible to argue with Richard Naylor's viewpoint - behind almost all the great things NZ has achieved there has been the determination and free spirited thinking combined with some #8 fencing wire... If the sheer effort and energy that goes into moaning and bitching about Telecom went into building an alternate network, we'd probably have it finished by now. Keith Davidson